Photographer Tag

Street photography is all about making a visual record of our era and I think it does this better than anything else. Television is filtered and polished and often there’s an agenda. So too with newspapers and magazines. But street photography is honest, unposed and speaks volumes

For this month, I’ve got a great story for you. It’s a tale about how an east end lad who left school at 14, became a great sixties photographer and went on to marry a famous Hollywood film star. The man in question is of course Terry O’Neill. His work of the period, shot in both black and white and colour, encapsulates that era perfectly and the famous people he shot reads like the pages of Who’s Who.

Producing and selling a calendar has become an increasingly popular way of raising funds for and awareness of worthwhile charities across the world. As such, many photographers are finding themselves asked by friends or family to shoot the images for these calendars. In this interview I spoke to pro photographer Tony Read about his involvement in a charity calendar and some of the challenges he faced shooting it.

In my opinion Jane Bown is one of the most influential British female photographers of the twentieth century. In Europe, she would be lauded as the great photographer she is, but sadly here in the UK we don’t seem to recognise that greatness in our own photographers and it seems few people have even heard of Jane Bown, a good reason to feature her work here.

Antonin Kratochvil is not a name that rolls off the tongue very easily, or a name that many people have heard of, which is why I’ve selected him. His images manage to convey a lot more about the subject than you might expect from this style, and it’s these qualities that make him so different to the usual studio images we know and love and a real breath of fresh air for me whenever I look at them.

Posters advertising county shows, fetes, gala days and various sporting attractions will be popping up on lamp-posts and telegraph poles across the country, and from a photogragrapher’s point of view many of these events can be an absolute photo goldmine. This blog post assumes that you’ll be at these events and one of potentially thousands of spectators and looks at some of the gear and techniques that may come in handy.

In the “Why I love my…” articles we will be asking photographers to tell us about a specific piece of equipment that they have developed a strong bond with and whose presence has improved their photographic experiences. It might be a near perfect combination of form and function that is to be put up on a pedestal and worshipped, or a flawed and challenging device that requires a fair bit of effort to wrangle the best out of, but whose companionship is essential. Here, Ben Weeks tells us why he loves his Lowepro DryZone 100 backpack.

Irving Penn was instrumental in the way we take portraits today. He was one of the first photographers to shoot his subjects against a neutral background in the studio, rather than setting them with props, and I admire Penn’s portrait work because of his ability to convey something about his subject, his ability to bridge the gap between the photographer and the sitter and his ability to create stunning compositions that have stood the test of time.

Finding myself early for a meeting, I went into the town centre in search of a strong coffee. As I entered the town hall square I noticed an advert for an exhibition of photography on show inside the town hall. So I forgot the coffee and headed inside. Now I’m no expert on wildlife images, but I do know a good composition when I see it and believe me, there some very fine photographs on show.

The theme for the November/December round of the Warehouse Express staff photo competition was “Light” and once again the entries were split into two categories; Beginner and Advanced. The quality of the images submitted was simply superb and there were several shots that could have won and would have deserved to do so.